Healthcare
Roundup
 
21 December 2022
 
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Seven days in the NHS and health IT
NHS
Advent strikes go ahead
Prime minister Rishi Sunak indicated there will be no early resolution to the strikes that have impacted the health service this week. In an interview with the Daily Mail, he said they could go on for months, because the government is “acting fairly and reasonably" and the unions aren’t. He also said unions should stop trying to unpick this year’s pay deal and focus on the future. Nurses in England, Wales and Northern Ireland were on strike on Tuesday (Guardian live blog), when huge demand pushed ambulance and hospital trusts into declaring “critical incidents” - before ambulance workers walked out on Wednesday (HSJ live blog).
Public health
Health news: about Covid-19 restrictions, penicillin shortages, and public health 
Almost three years after the World Health Organisation was notified of what became known as Covid-19, the government has relaxed its guidance on masks and testing in social care. Care homes and other providers can now make their own, risk-based decisions on when masks are needed. The government has also taken measures to allow pharmacists to adjust some penicillin prescriptions, in the light of shortages partly caused by concern about Strep A. And it has started to publish the regular Health Survey for England, with a focus on obesity and alcohol consumption: 26% of adults are obese – 20% in the least deprived areas and 34% in the most.    
Shared care records
Devon and Cornwall Care Record goes live on its Orion Health platform 
The Devon and Cornwall Care Record has gone live on the Orion Health Amadeus platform, which will provide the infrastructure for its shared care record. The go-live means frontline staff can access key items of patient information from GP, hospital, health and social care IT systems as a single record. The area plans to build on this, so professionals working across the two counties have a more complete view of a patient’s history. This should save them the time they currently spend contacting other services for information to inform diagnosis and treatment decisions (Health Tech World).
Health IT
Great Ormond Street deploys Sectra PACS
Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust is going to deploy a picture archiving and communications system from Sectra. The enterprise imaging solution will enhance the way in which healthcare teams access X-rays, CTs, MRIs, and other scans, and enable radiologists to view and report images on a single system, with voice recognition. It will also integrate with the trust’s electronic patient record. Jane Rendall, UK managing director for Sectra said the deployment will provide tools that will further innovation at the trust, which signed up for the Sectra One subscription model in September (digitalhealth.net).
Health IT
Health IT news: about TPP and Frontline Digitisation 
Frank Hester, the well-known boss of Leeds-based TPP, has taken to Twitter to condemn NHS bosses for wasting money on over-priced IT systems, when cheaper, UK alternatives are available (digitalhealth.net). NHS England is about to launch a Frontline Digitisation programme that could be structured to favour US, single supplier systems. It has just awarded a contract worth up to £9 million for a delivery partner for the programme. This has gone to PwC. A second contract, to review new digital maturity assessments for each trust, has gone to McKinsey (Health Service Journal). The NHS is supposed to be reducing spend on consultancies.
Health IT
Festive health tech: from WiFi SPARK and Sunnyside 
WiFi SPARK has renewed its commitment to making sure that NHS patients can enjoy the best festive entertainment without worrying about the cost, by offering hospitals three days of free TV on Christmas Day, Boxing Day, and New Year’s Day. Chief executive Matt O’Donovan said the significant take-up of a similar offer last year proves the case for switching from a patient pays to a ‘free at the point of use’ model for communications, entertainment, and information (Health Tech World). US app company Sunnyside has launched a Dry(ish) January Challenge to help people cut their alcohol consumption (Health Tech World).
The Highland Marketing review of 2022
Analysis
Governments came and went, Budget commitments were made and unmade, a big NHS IT programme was promised but never quite unveiled, there were few software deployments but three, big outages. And through it all, there was a sense that the NHS is truly reaching a crisis point. Highland Marketing looks back at the year as it unfolded in the Healthcare Roundup newsletter.
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